Hell on Earth: A Love Story
by ManiacMotherland
Summary: On the internet, everyone lies. Will Bella find the man of her dreams in a group on a MMORPG? Or will she find just another dog? O/S, AH. BPOV. M-rated for language, sexual situations. Entry for TFA 31 Days of Halloween.


**Summary: **On the internet, everyone lies. Will Bella find the man of her dreams in a group on a MMORPG? Or will she find just another dog? O/S, AH. BPOV. Entry for TFA 31 Days of Halloween.

**Rating**: M-rated for language, sexual situations.

**A/N: **I am a nerd. I love Arizona. I love Twilight. And the ending is cheesy. Abandon hope all ye who enter here!

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any part of Twilight. Stephenie Meyer retains all rights. Yay her!

* * *

**Hell on Earth: A Love Story**

The minions had finally arrived. A death squad of ten-feet-tall skeletons, with maggots wriggling through drooping tatters of skin which were still attached to their rattling joints. This army now lurched over the horizon and across the blasted heath towards my companion and myself.

To kill us, yes. But—more to the point—to consume us, before killing us.

Still alive as the flesh was torn from our bones. Still conscious as they ate into our brains. If we were lucky, a bash to the head and we would be unconscious as they gnawed through our innards and spit out the contents of our last meal as an unsavory substitute to our muscle and fat.

They had no souls, and therefore, we had no hope. I grappled my wounded partner by the waist and told her to muster up one last fireball of life-force and send as many of the monsters as she could, straight back to hell.

That's when I heard him, my hero, my savior, my messiah. Yelling like a berserker, running like a train on fire, cresting the outcropping of rock in front of us, brandishing his ancestral sword.

He paused for a moment at the base of the pitted stones to take in the scene. Then fluid half-moon swipes sent them all scattering.

Shoulders and knees and elbows swung and hit target. Hand-bombs of burning pitch blinded them. A battle-cry at the top of his lungs: "By the Blessed Lady of Samhara, you shall not infest these lands with your contagion!"

Then he battled like a lion. Until all the horrid fiends gave up and ran away with a tangled, long and painful howl.

One thing you could say about Halvor, he really was one hot tamale when he was staying in character and killing mobs.

Apparently, however, I was the only one to see just how sexy Hal was. Our partner, Mersham (another female player, I think, but I wasn't quite sure), was about ready to rip him a new one.

"Took you long enough! Fucking motherfucker Christ!" The words bursting the momentary silence of voice chat, after the melee was over. I shifted the headphone and microphone combo that I wore on my head so the full impact of the anger blasted wasn't directly into my ear. "This isn't a RP server! I really need a pee break, and the dog is barking to go out. Will be gone about ten minutes. Just please don't get me killed before I make it back. I have set my auto-follow on Ivy."

"What's his deal?" Hal typed to me in a private text message, so Mersham couldn't hear us. "Did I not just royally save his ass from about three dozen Hell Guards? Without him having to rezz back even once?"

"Yeah, but you did take your own sweet time doing it, loverboy," I typed back.

The cursor sat there blinking, for nearly a minute. Or at least I thought it was a minute. Sure felt like a lifetime.

Perhaps I had gone too far in calling my gaming buddy Hal "loverboy." I only sorta-kinda knew him.

This is how it happened. We'd both started playing the trendy new MMORPG _Hell on Earth _a couple months ago on Friday nights. And then, after talking while our characters camped out a spot between campaigns, we'd both eventually realized that we lived in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

I grew up in Arizona, and let me tell you what, the city known as "Phoenix" is actually a megacity, and it can take you the better part of two hours to get from Deer Valley to Apache Junction during rush-hour traffic. They don't call I-17 the "Black Canyon Parking Lot" for nothing.

All totaled up: just because we both "live in Phoenix" doesn't mean that we have to interact anywhere IRL, a.k.a. " in real life" for the newbs in the room.

Fuck real life anyway. At least on the weekends. On Friday nights, I'm here to game.

I mean, yeah… okay, I guess I was more than just a little curious to see if Halvor was really that gorgeous and ripped in person. But what if he wasn't? What if he was just some pimple-dotted and fat-assed creep living out in his mom's spare Arizona room.

Grand Canyon State Translation: basically, a screened-in porch where you store bicycles and Christmas decorations and crap like that. Not even really a room, by most people's standards. You could be living in a tent and that would almost be an upgrade from the typical Arizona room.

And how exactly was I to know if what Hal told me was the truth, anyway? It's like they say, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

Maybe my online friend was a real woofer IRL. If I found out that Halvor was some 40-year-old techno-virgin, and the date crashed and burned, then there would go my standing TGIF gaming session. And I really needed that time to be selfish and decompress from work. Saturday night was for dates, to try and find Mr. Right somewhere here in the Valley of the Sun. And Sunday night was for any last-minute prep for the 60-hour week that lay before me each Monday, bright and shiny at 8:00 a.m. without fail.

Which was why I hadn't even asked Hal his real name yet. And I certainly hadn't told him mine.

Still, sometimes you have downtime with another player from your group. So you switch to PM and chat with them while you are waiting for other players' various pee breaks and dog walks and pizza deliveries and beer runs. It's times like this when your defenses are down.

Nine times out of ten, the first question a guy asks is, "Are your boobs really that big?" But Hal was different. He told me my name Ivy was pretty.

Who am I kidding? He was probably still looking at my tits. And could you blame him? They are fucking huge in this metal push-bra. Like Pamela Lee and just as fake. When I run, I can't even see my feet! And then there is my ass. It is fucking Baby-Got-Back big.

_Which reminds me_, I thought. _I need to add that song to my gaming playlist_.

Yep, it all comes down to T&A. But what can you expect? Men design these games. Still, a growing number of women like myself—perfectly normal, and completely successful, and not even all that ugly—now play online games on a regular basis.

By day, I am an attorney in a boringly beige law firm. By night, I kill ogres and giants and ghouls (oh my!) as I blast out music and obliterate my weeklong diet with junk food and beer.

Honestly, I prefer my nights to my days. Who wouldn't? Tell me, exactly what's so great about growing up? Figure out what you want to do, get a degree (or two) and a career. And then all of the sudden, life becomes a big ol' pain in the ass.

More bills, less time. More them, less you.

"So, hey there, Ivy," wrote Hal. "You going to tell me exactly where you live? Queen Creek? Glendale? Buckeye? Because I have a house in an older part of Scottsdale. Maybe we could get together and wander up and down Mill Avenue in Tempe. It's gone all corporate, I know. But Fat Tuesday is still kind of fun. Especially on a weekday. To blow off some steam."

I jolted up a little bit in my seat. A really nice black leather console chair that I had paid an obscene amount of money for at Fry's Electronics over on Baseline, last August.

Fuck me! I had almost forgot that I was waiting for a response from Hal. And from what I was reading on the screen, Hal had just asked me out on a date.

_Ummmmm… ummmmmm… ummmmm_. The keys clattered; my hands were shaking more than I would like to admit. "I just want to have a friend to play with, Hal."

"Friends, you say?" he responded quickly. "But friends with benefits? A guy can hope, after all."

"Nope. Just friend-friends. And don't tell me that we can get around it by having phone sex, because I tried that with a college boyfriend when I went away for law school. It isn't the same."

"Law school, huh?" Hal caught my slip-up. "Hmmm. I never took you for the shyster type."

"Ah, crap. So now you know my darkest secrets. I game online and I'm a lawyer. So sue me."

Hal laughed, a deep and rumbling sort of laugh, and I could hear it through the headset. Surely, if he were a pudgy and puffy man-child who didn't own much more than his computer and a pair of overstretched sweat pants, he would snort instead, and not chortle so manly, right?

At least I hoped so. I wanted to say something to him directly, but I was afraid that Mersham would overhear, so I remained silent.

"Nah, Ivy," he typed, once the laughter had stopped. "Think the shoe is on the other foot here. But, then again, I haven't actually done anything wrong. Maybe quoted some sources without adequate enough citations in grad school. But, hell, who hasn't done that at some point? Joe Biden did that, and he's Vice President of the U-S-of-A now. At least, now I have tenure."

"I see… so, grad school? Tenure? So… that makes you…what… a professor? And in what discipline? Teaching at ASU? Do tell, loverboy."

"Well, I don't know, sweet cheeks. Maybe I shouldn't tell you. Maybe it is getting too personal to tell you. Aren't we supposed to just be friend-friends? Or, if I tell you, will you let me buy you a beer in person at some point? A think that's a fair compromise."

Hal hung the offer out there, and I didn't know exactly what to say right then. I needed to sleep on it. But sleep was for wusses on Friday night. I wasn't going down until at least 4:00 a.m.

"Alright ladies!" Mersham finally burst back into the conversation. "A guy from my league is a healer, and he just sent me a tell to get an invite. That means Ivy can finally tank the mob while I nuke him and Hal does all kinds of wicked DPS on his ass. So let's go after that son-of-bitch Demon Lich King, once and for all. I am tired of bunny-hilling it here with these skellies."

"Sure enough, buddy. Just give me the name of your friend," Hal replied in voice chat, quickly closing down the PM conversation and focusing on the quest now before us. "But Ivy, remember our bet. I think you will find that Mersham is a guy-guy in real life, so you owe me 100 gold ducats. Send it to my castle's steward. And I think you also owe me an answer to my question. Next Friday is good. Take your time. Here we go, my comrades…"

########

The swirling leather of bat wings made it nearly possible to see the way out of the cave. My feet kept slipping on the rocks beneath me and then there was the voice. Deep and resonant, yet still piercing and biting, like a bone claw scraping its bloody knuckles down a long wall of glass.

"_YOU SHALL NOT LIVE! YOU SHALL BE GUTTED AS YOU SQUEAL! YOU SHALL NOT LIVE! FOR I AM XERNU, LORD OF THE GATES OF HELL! GAZE ON ME AND DESPAIR!"_

"Fuck me!" Hal grumbled. "We haven't seen the guy yet and already I want him dead. All that bluster, I wonder what he looks like. Maybe he's just a soft and cuddly teddy bear."

"He's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you've ever set eyes on!" our new healer Wilhelm snickered, as he paused for a moment, trying hard to remove the fear spell that was causing my peripheral vision to spin about like a carnival ride.

"This is your only warning, Wil," grunted Hal. "Quoting Monty Python will earn you a swift and permanent ban from the group."

"What's your damage?" whined Wil. "You don't like them, or something?"

"On the contrary. But all it takes is one troll to start quoting them in The Homelands, and then…"

"Oh, I get it. Because I don't like spam!" Wil chirped, in a so-so British accent, mocking the famous Python skit that was appropriated by the earliest computer programmers of the '70s and '80s, to describe anything excessive and annoying. Kind of like our current companion. Yep, it was just me and Hal and Mersh, and the thoroughly obnoxious and rude Spam Boy.

"Yes. You got it. So I'm warning you. Nicely. That's one and a half times. We need a healer, so please drop it. Focus instead on getting Ivy back on her feet. How you doing there, Ivy?"

Wil sent a silent text message to me at this point, which popped up on my screen.

"Is Hal your friend? Because the man is a real A-hole. WTF!"

I almost pretended I hadn't received the PM, but then I decided I needed to stick up for Hal.

"He is my best friend, Wil. And he is a damn fine leader. So just do what he says. Please?"

"KK. But you have to tell me. Where do you live? Because I was wondering if… we…"

"HELL HOUNDS!" Mersham screamed and I pressed the earphone against my head as I spun my character around and shut down the increasingly unpleasant chat with Wil, simultaneously.

"Throw some god-damn lightning balls, morons!" Wil was a constant patter of narration. "Oh shit! I'm almost out of soul-ammo! I can't do many more heals! Oh my fuck! That guy is huge!"

"This is my group. So… Shut… The… Hell… Up!" yelled Hal. "Use enduring flame instead, Mersh. Aim it at his feet. My other main alt is a caster and warlocks are vulnerable to fire. Counterintuitive, I know, since they are from hell. But it works. Great job! Now, Ivy, how you doing, sweetie? I want you to shield both you and me as we move in for melee. I know it takes a bit of practice, but you can do it. Well done! Now dual-wield and pummel the hell out of the guy. I will work on the sidekicks. Now, you, Wil. I am putting you on mute. Just shut the fuck up and heal, god-damn you. And we might get through this battle alive."

#######

"Finally! That punk was tough!" Wil was panting over the voice chat, about an hour later. "What's the repair cost on your armor, Halvor? Because I will pay for it. I promise I will. "

"No big, Wil," yawned Hal. "Ivy still owes me money, so she will pay to fix me up. But you know, it is about three o'clock in the morning Arizona Daylight Savings Time. So I think I am going to call it a night."

"Arizona Daylight Savings Time?" Wil shot back. "What the fucking hell is that? Do you have your own time zone or something? Jesus, how lame."

"Short answer: yes," I responded in Hal's defense. "We have so much sunshine here in Arizona, all year round, that we don't need to save it. In fact, give me your address, and I will ship you some in a box. No charge."

"Well, sure! I live with my mom here in Seattle, but if you have a pen close by, my real name is… Mike… Newton… and do you understand street directions here in Washington, or do I need to spell it out for you? I would love to find out if your… breasts…"

_Yes! They are plenty big! And they are real! Holy crow, what a grade-A dochebag!_

Tired and annoyed, I hit a macro button that simultaneously did two things at once: degroup and set my status as AFK. Again, that's "away from keyboard" for the newbsters in our midst.

It would appear to my group that I had been accidentally cut off from the server (here in Arizona, I always blamed a quick disconnect on a freak lightning storm, which does happen a lot—in August, while this was October). Generally speaking, it was really a way to make a quick escape.

Kind of like the online equivalent of giving a guy a wrong number and then saying you needed to freshen up in the little girls' room when you really intended to duck out the back door instead.

They would wait around for me, for a while, but not long. Later, I could give them some kind of sob story. That is, if I didn't decide to hang up that character for a bit and play another alt until I was sure that the dickhead in question wasn't going to hunt me down again, trying to hit on me.

What can I say to defend myself? The internet is full of dogs, and so, sometimes I am a bitch.

"You mock-logging on us, honey?" Hal connected to me in a private voice chat channel before I could get fully logged off. I was exhausted, but it was nice to hear his voice before I left.

"That new guy is an uber-dork. And I'm tired. Didn't you say that you were tired too? I can only sleep in until about noon on Saturdays. I've got too much to do the rest of the weekend."

"Yeah, Wil was getting kind of fresh there at the end. I would get fresh too, if it would get you out of that armor. But… I'm not… _that _tired," he yawned and then mumbled through an apology. "You say the word, Ivy, and I will meet you. Anywhere. Even if it is across town."

I sat there, staring at the pop-up that said "LOG NOW: YES?" and tapped my toe as I thought.

In the flesh was too far, too soon. But this was the cyberworld. Why limit the imagination here?

"I'm not ready to meet you face to face," I finally whispered. "But my date for tomorrow night cancelled earlier today… well, yesterday, at this point… so, and I can't believe I'm really doing this… but, tell me something, Hal… do you have a _Second Life_ account?"

#######

I don't get the Furry sex subculture; I really don't. Dressing up like Winnie the Pooh and fucking Tigger? (They call it "yiffing"). Seriously. Not my cup of tea.

And there are plenty of Furry sex clubs here on _Second Life_. Plus gay, and lesbian, and bondage, and midget, and ponyplay, and sex toys, and Japanese lolicon, and about any kind of variation on getting off that the human mind can imagine. Entire areas are age-verified and geared towards particular interests. Want to be gay, be gay. Want to be Superman, be Superman. Want to be hairy, be hairy. 'Cuz, baby, you were born that way. At least online.

I still don't get Furries. To each their own, of course. But, once again, really not my thing.

Me, I'm an old-fashioned kind of girl. Yeah, so I have some black lingerie and some fishnet stocking and some patent leather stiletto heels. Since I can't wear the latter in real life, without falling over whenever I try to move, at least I get to wear them somewhere. In my own private love nest, to be exact. Here on _Second Life_. But that is about it. I am pretty vanilla, to be honest.

I don't even know why exactly I made this place. I haven't visited it in ages. Sure, I fucked around with my first avatar (a tall, blonde slut named Busty McFeelie), just to see what the hype was about. But since then, with this persona, I haven't brought anyone over to my house for a visit. Hal would be my first guest with this particular character, and lord, I was nervous.

The doorbell rang, and I inhaled forcefully a couple times to calm my racing heartbeat. Then my online persona walked over to the door, reached out a hand and turned the knob.

"Good evening. Oh, Ivy. What can I say?" Hal's avatar smiled at me from the other side of the threshold. "You look gorgeous. A tad underdressed perhaps. But still gorgeous."

"Underdressed?" I responded. "I'd say you were overdressed, in that tux. Stunning. But way too many clothes. So… ummmm… thanks… for… the… flowers. But I'm confused. I thought we were talking about… something more… random. And what's this? It says your name is actually… Edward Cullen? You aren't using a fake name? This is really you? Huh. I don't think I have ever met an actual, living person in here before."

"Yes, well… this is my professional account, you see, so I can interact with the distance students who take my lower-level classes. I teach linguistics. Hal means rock in various Scandinavian tongues, and vor means guardian. That is to say, protector. There are hundreds of names around the world that mean protector, born of a time when human life was very precarious and you needed warriors to defend you on a day-to-day basis. Edward specifically translates to protector of prosperity. I protect the 'ed'. Whatever an 'ed' is. But you can still call me Hal, if you want."

I backed up a few steps. This cyberdate wasn't going exactly as I had planned. It actually seemed a little bit… what was the word I was looking for? Oh yeah, it seemed _real_.

A real date. With Edward Cullen, tenured professor of the Linguistic Division of the English Deparment of ASU. Fuck me.

"Clever. But that means, and I'm just guessing here, there will be no Stroker Serpetine going on tonight?" I choked out the question as I started to change my character into a black satin robe.

Why did my reply stick in my throat? I considered it for an instant and realized that I was strangely hurt by the fact that my partner had shown up for a date-date and not a fuck-date.

It took me a while, but I soon figured it out. I felt rejected somehow. That simply made no sense! He was there; he had shown up. With flowers. So why did I feel my heart splinter, just a bit?

"I have no idea what those words mean, Ivy." Hal shook his head as he spoke.

"Stroker Serpentine is the father of cybercock. He wrote the macro that allows men to equip a penis onto their avatars on Second Life. You can even add one that talks. Calls out when it is aroused. Screams out when it shoots it load. Jesus, Edward! When I asked if you had a _Second Life_ account, I figured you understood we were talking about cybersex. Just cybersex."

"You are calling me Edward, yet I still don't know your real name, Ivy." The man in the tux grinned at me and waited for my reply which wasn't immediately forthcoming. "And no, by the way, I am about as equipped as a Ken doll down there. Practically a eunuch. You must forgive me. I had other plans for this evening, you see."

I didn't type /cry or any such nonsense like that. But I was crying IRL, and it probably came through in the pattern of my voice in chat. I even sniffed a little bit as the moisture went past my eyes and hit my nose. And that was a dead give-away over the microphone.

"Are you…" Edward paused. "Are you… crying… Ivy? Why are you crying? Did I say something to hurt you? Because I didn't mean to. I apologize… but I'm a little confused. Tell me, why are you crying?"

"No, it's just… I'm being stupid," I whined. "I just… didn't plan… and I don't want to tell you my name right now. I hardly even now you, Hal… Edward… whatever! You aren't even real!"

"I feel pretty real, right now," whispered Edward. "But it doesn't matter. I can wait for you to decide when to tell me who you are out there, in the real world. In the meantime, there's something I wanted to do tonight. And please, Ivy, don't spoil it for me."

My cyberdate then got down on one knee and pulled a small red box out from the inside of his suitcoat. I felt my head start to spin from the possibility of what I was seeing. Was the newly rechristened Edward Cullen really going to do what I think he was going to do? Was he really going to propose to me in _Second Life_? Fuck me.

"This is me, really me, really Edward. And I have fallen in love with the person I met three months ago online. I want to spend all my Fridays and all of my weekends with you, in cyberspace. So, please, answer my question: Ivy Trousseau, will you cybermarry me?"

Marriage, ugh, marriage. Even cybermarriage wasn't really what I was looking for right then.

Regardless, I took the ring out of the velvet cloth and turned it around several times for the pixels of the cyberdiamond to catch the cyberlight.

Hal was, like I had said, a hot tamale. And what was the worst that could happen, if I said yes, there in the strange and unreal world of _Second Life_?

"Ohhhhhh, alright," I sighed as I slipped the engagement ring on my third left-hand finger. "But do you know what this means? It means that if we break up here in _Second Life_, it will be the kiss of death for our time gaming together on _Hell on Earth_. Also, just FYI, I know some really good divorce lawyers. And I will sue you down to your cyberskivvies if you break my cyberheart. Consider yourself warned."

"I am willing to take that chance," his character then stood up to kiss my character and I gave him permission. I could hear him breathe heavily on the other end of the chatline. "You won't regret it, love. I have saved up all my Linden dollars and we can buy ourselves a little cottage, and live as happy as larks. And, I promise, just as soon as we get married, I will buy myself a cybercock. Then we can go on a cyberhoneymoon. Get you cyberpregnant before we even come back to our cybercareers."

I nodded and kissed him again, and then moved back to get a good look at my new cyberfiance.

"I'd enjoy that. We can go away to an island maybe. Somewhere tropical." I agreed, before we sat down and killed the rest of the evening watching a movie together, chatting back and forth on Skype until my avatar fell asleep in his arms. "Because I have a feeling, Edward, that our little slice of our cyberlife together, as man and wife, is going to be just this side of Heaven on Earth."


End file.
